1
hummingbird greeting:
out of the tree, everywhere
hello, then nowhere
2
recede jet engine
disappear humanity
cricket stickiness
Two haiku Sunday, 8/14
in Poetry
Poem, 6/7
for Suzanne vega
to photograph a
bird in flight is like time stopped
the moment is gone
Ride highlights
I’m training for the ALC ride to LA this summer. More about that on Medium.com.
Training Ride 5, May 8: 58.2 miles. Tackled Mount Tam in the fog. What you can’t see can’t scare you. Brought plenty of snacks. Breathed it all in. (Not the snacks.) Paced myself and was in for the long haul. Was out all day but felt great when I got home. Legs are poppin’. Definitely got into a cyclists’ high towards the end – compelled to just keep going and going and going.
Coming down the mountain at 33 MPH peak speed is cause for laughter and elation. What a magical place to live, to bike, to be outside and alive.
Training Ride 3, April 24: 22 miles. Hadn’t been on the bike in two months, because moving and vacation, so in two hours I went from my new home up to Hawk Hill and back. Stopped a few times, because gorgeous.
Training Ride 4, April 30: 55 miles! Today with the incomparable and gorgeous @emmahazlett, we rode 55 miles, up Hawk Hill (without stopping, yay!), down the other side, through the tunnel, over to Sausalito for a smoothie, through Mill Valley, and halfway up Mount Tamalpais. You may be able to see that MapMyRide botched the last chunk of data between lunch in Sausalito and back home, so I adjusted it — and switched to Strava.
Training Ride 2, February 28: 55 miles. Highlights include: 1500' elevation gain (Antelope Dam is at just over 5000'), fresh snow-capped mountain air, stopping for a sandwich on the way up and a beer on the way back at the Taylorsville market (great sandwiches, girls!), cooking dinner with the Pew family afterwards, and consuming back some of those 2600 calories I burned.
Wildlife spotted:
150 deer
40-5o cows
15-20 wild turkeys
5 geese
2 mallards
2 ducks with red bills, black heads, and white bodies
1 bobcat!
Training Ride 1, February 20: 40 miles (not pictured below: the 4.5 miles each way between my house and the origin point). Highlights include: Training with Joe and Darin, the views of the GG Bridge from the Berkeley Hills, lunch at the Oakland Farmer’s Market, taking the bridge bike path for the first time.
My books
This week I finished unpacking books I had with me since I moved to SF, and integrated them with ones that had been in storage for years. They all sit now in beautiful built-in shelves, in an upstairs fireplace’d parlor room of a 1890s victorian in the Fair Oaks neighborhood. I am happy that my books are all here.
I arranged:
- Biographies. No surprise, I like people. Moss Hart (my namesake). Copland, Wilde, Anderson, Bernstein, Bacon.
- Books on words. Compact OED, Handy MidEast phrases, Basque to English, The Meaning of Meaning.
- Children’s books. Including some of my own from my childhood, and others I’ve picked up.
- Old books. Cute pocket sized Shakespeare, first edition Dickens, Oscar Wilde, illuminated Salome, illuminated Rubaiyat.
- Art books. One whole shelf. Magritte, Sendak, Holzer, Sherman, Ruscha. Vernacular drawings.
- Design books. One other whole shelf. Tibor, Graphis, Millman, Pentagram.
- Zines. Lots and lots of independent publication love over the years. Non. Might. Outpost Journal. Hello Mr., Jarry, Headmaster, Gum, Encyclopedia. Lots and lots of small books which I always am drawn to.
- Fiction. Some from my childhood and other new fiction I would like to read.
- Self. Books on spirituality in art, music, listening to the universe kinda stuff.
- Business inspiration. Being nice, reworking, teams.
- Poetry. Whitman, Rumi, Wilbur, Siken, Milton, cummings.
I’d say that paints a nice portrait of who I am.
Poem, 4/24
death is what it takes
artists and creators birth
ideas for living
Aww & awe
The aww of giving: Today I got word from my ol’ roommate, K., that she received an antique butler I shipped her. When we lived together in 1999–2000, she let me borrow hers (in perpetuity) as she left for New York, knowing it wouldn’t fit into her much smaller apartment. This morning’s first text opened: “moved to actual tears.” It marked the conclusion of a 16-year-old promise I kept, one she never knew at what point it would be concluded (if she’d even recalled loaning me the thing). I loved starting the day with pictures of her kids playing with the packing material, a jacket draped over the jacket holder.
The awe of receiving: When I got to work, I checked my email and discovered that one of my old friends from back east, M., had donated $500 to my ALC ride. I was speechless! And then energized, feeling that much closer to the finish line.
Poem, 3/6
a nonchalant man
not paying attention to
the puddle, splashes
Poem, 12/11
nobody can make
a suicide blooper reel
we all get one shot
Live from Studio D, it’s my first Creative Live class!
On Tuesday I broke ground on an important topic in a new teaching environment. It was my first (and definitely not last) teaching experience at Creative Live.
When researching for my class, Building a Brand Book: When, Why, and How, I realized that there’s no standardization of what elements go into brand standards. Certainly each company is unique, but I saw a great opportunity to establish a hierarchy of recommended content contained in a company’s brand standards, vis-à-vis the scale of the company. To my knowledge, this hasn’t been done.
Preparing for six hours of content was somewhat easy, since I’ve got a lot of case studies from my professional experience about the power of brand transformations, and how it aligns people, rekindles their passion, and is a quantitative measure of success. I talked a lot about the value of consistency and how brand standards help ensure that.
But what was new about this experience – and more of a challenge to prepare for – were the role-play conversations, and guiding the six in-studio students (pictured, top row above) about how to have them. It’s easy to recognize the signs of inconsistency, harder to do take matters into your own hands and do something about it. By the end of the class, they felt empowered, and saw how much they could do.
The most thrilling part was the reach: 2500 people live-streamed the class from all over the world. Some students hung out on CL all day. The impeccable host, Chris Jennings (holding Brand Bible, above), did an amazing job integrating their chat room comments and questions into the course content, and bringing a global perspective from designers and non-designers alike. And he did it all with a smile. Thank you, Chris, Aleza, the production team, and Creative Live!
Backing and forthing
To gain personal insights on my life over the past few years, I analyzed my time traveling between NYC, SFO, and PVD from September 2012 through last month. The y axis is the number of days in the month in any one city. The x axis represents a few years.
Even though I became a full-time San Franciscan in April 2014, it’s felt like I’ve lived here longer. I’ve been coming back and forth semi-regularly for upwards of 10 years. But June 2013 marked the first time I was in SFO nearly a full month.
